Dead Dogs’ Hole

Hello again, London Walkers. And top of the morning to you, wherever you are. Question for you. How’s this for a life trajectory? My life trajectory as it happens. I’m “from the forest.” Or if you prefer, “from the wood.”

And the forest was in the Driftless Hills.

And the Driftless Hills are in “the Land of the Gathering Waters.”

So, yes, that’s where I’m from. Where I got started and where I grew up. The forest in the Driftless Hills in the Land of the Gathering Waters.

“Lucky you,” you say. “That’s so appealing. So romantic. Pastoral perfection. Good start in life.”

“So where’d you end up?”

Ah, yes, my life trajectory. From the forest, from the Driftless Hills, from the Land of the Gathering Waters to Dead Dog Hole.

Here in London.

Ok, that’s enough of a tease. The Dance of Four Veils.

Four veils of names. Let’s bare all.

I was born in Dubuque, Iowa. The place name Dubuque comes from a French name ultimately associated with woodland. Spot on for what would have been a beautiful, wooded, bluff-lined stretch of the upper Mississippi.

It’s almost dreamlike that name. Or combination of names.

And come to think of it, nomenclature-wise this is actually the Dance of the Six Veils. Because Iowa takes its name from the Ioway people, a Native American nation whose tribal lands were right there, in the upper Mississippi Valley.

And – gotta love this – the name Ioway is often translated as “the sleepy ones” or “the drowsy ones.”

Well, who knows.

I said that series of names is dreamy, dream-like.

Maybe if you’re from there, those hills and bluffs and woods and gathering waters – and no question but what gathers those waters is “the great river” – which is what the word Mississippi means. It’s an Ojibway word.

If that’s where you come into the world – if that pastoral perfection is your world – this, needless to say, is before my ancestors got there – you might well be a drowsy one, permanently lulled into a dreamlike state by the sheer perfection of your surroundings.

And as for the other names.

The Driftless Hills, that’s southwestern Wisconsin. And the tri-state area. Where I grew up.

Driftless Hills because for some reason the glacier that thousands of years ago pushed down there, reshaped, bulldozed, flattened vast parts of Canada and the northern United States – for some reason that glacier bypassed – swung and missed the Driftless Hills, there in the southwestern part of Wisconsin.

The fancy word is the Driftless Hills – that landscape – is geomorphologically much older than everything around it. The Midwestern glaciation didn’t flatten it out.

So that’s the Driftless Hills.

Last veil. Wisconsin. Let’s take it off. And all is revealed.

Wisconsin is an Ojibway word – a Native American word.

Tradition has it that it means, the Land of the Gathering Waters.

Really beautiful, isn’t it.

So you can take it as read, I love it when people hear my twang and ask where I’m from.

I love saying, “I’m from the Land of the Gathering Waters.”

I mean if you were in my shoes and could answer that question in one of two ways: I’m from CheeseHead Land or I’m from the Land of the Gathering Waters, which one would you plump for?

But to cut to the chase.

Yes, got started in the woods in the Driftless Hills in the Land of the Gathering Waters.

And ended up in Dead Dog Hole.

Takes some doing, that trip.

Let’s do that trip.

Came to London. And in due course found myself working in a building in Camden Town.

A great hulking red-brick building beside the Regent’s Canal.

It was called the Interchange.

It was home to Worldwide Television News, where the London Walks capo, that’s me, this retreaded academic, where I was a journalist, a news editor.

The Interchange was my workplace. For years.

I knew the building. Knew its corridors. Its offices. Its comings and goings.

Or thought I did.

Because yesterday I discovered something about the place that fairly stopped me in my tracks.

Right underneath it was a stretch of water with one of the most gloriously grisly names in London.

Dead Dog’s Hole.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

Dead. Dog’s. Hole.

And no, it wasn’t named by some mischievous Camden punk rocker in the 1970s.

The name goes back much further.

And the story behind it takes us into an extraordinary chapter of London’s industrial history.

To a time when Camden Town wasn’t about tattoos, vintage clothes, street food and tourists.

It was about muscle.

Horses. Steam engines. Coal.

Beer barrels.

Railway wagons.

And an awful lot of hard graft.

Let’s wind the clock back.

The Regent’s Canal opened in 1820, providing a waterway across north London and connecting the capital to the wider canal network.

Then came the railways.

The London and Birmingham Railway opened its Camden goods depot in 1839.

And here was a problem.

Or rather, an opportunity.

The canal could bring goods into Camden by water.

The railway could carry goods onwards at speed.

And horse-drawn carts could distribute them around London’s streets.

Three different forms of transport.

Three different worlds.

What if you could bring them together under one roof?

Well, that’s precisely what happened.

The site developed through the nineteenth century, and in 1905 the London and North Western Railway opened a splendid new warehouse.

The Interchange.

And what a piece of industrial ingenuity it was.

Imagine the scene.

Down below, at water level, a canal basin.

A great covered dock, 210 feet long and about 45 feet wide.

Big enough to accommodate six barges.

Above it, railway tracks and loading platforms.

And above those, three more floors of warehousing.

Goods could be hoisted up from boats, moved across to railway wagons, stored upstairs or loaded onto road vehicles.

Trapdoors in the railway platforms gave access to the boats below.

Cranes and hoists did the heavy lifting.

It was a great machine for moving things.

And what things!

Beer. Wine. Merchandise of every description.

Nearby were the great bonded warehouses of W. and A. Gilbey, the wine and spirits merchants.

There were horse tunnels too.

Actual tunnels for horses, threading their way beneath the railway yards.

Camden was a gigantic working transport hub.

And then there was the basin.

Yes. You remembered. How could you forget it.

Dead Dog’s Hole.

Where on earth did that name come from?

Well, the explanation is both straightforward and rather gruesome.

The canal basin was a place where floating rubbish accumulated.

Debris carried along the waterways collected in this sheltered backwater.

And among the debris, sadly, the bodies of dead animals. Flung into the canal.

Dogs included.

Hence Dead Dog’s Hole.

Not a name the tourist board would necessarily have chosen.

But an unforgettable one.

And here’s another lovely detail.

The little towpath bridge across the entrance to the basin dates from the middle of the nineteenth century.

Which means that when the present Interchange building went up in 1905, the bridge and the basin were already old hands.

They’d been there for roughly half a century.

And there was another half-century of industrial activity behind them.

By the time I came along, the goods wagons and horse-drawn carts had long since disappeared.

The building had entered an entirely different chapter.

Television news.

Worldwide Television News.

WTN.

Think of the contrast.

Once upon a time, goods arrived here on barges and railway wagons.

When I worked there, pictures and reports arrived from the four corners of the earth.

The cargo had changed.

No longer barrels and boxes.

Now it was news.

Pictures. Events. History unfolding.

And somehow there’s a wonderful appropriateness about that.

The Interchange was still an interchange.

Only now the traffic was information.

The world coming into Camden. Camden sending the world back out again.

And all the while, beneath our feet, the old basin remained.

Its dark water. Its iron columns. Its extraordinary history.

Dead Dog’s Hole.

And now for another twist.

James Bond.

Yes. James Bond.

Because in 2015, the film-makers working on Spectre, the Daniel Craig Bond film, came to Camden Town.

They needed a secret underground workshop for Q.

You know Q. The clever clogs who supplies Bond with all those ingenious gadgets. The exploding pens, the specially equipped Aston Martins, the ingenious little devices that get 007 out of impossible scrapes.

And where did they find the entrance to Q’s secret underground headquarters?

Dead Dog’s Hole.

The very place underneath my old office.

In the film, Bond and Tanner approach Q’s headquarters by boat.

And the entrance to the old canal basin, the dark tunnel beneath the Interchange, stands in for the entrance to this top-secret world of high-tech espionage.

Think of it.

A stretch of water once notorious for its floating rubbish and dead animals.

And now it’s the entrance to Q’s secret laboratory.

From dead dogs to double-O-seven.

From canal barges to Bond.

I worked in that building for years.

Thought I knew it well.

But until 24 hours ago, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

That, for me, is one of the enduring wonders of London.

You think you know a place.

You’ve walked through its doors a thousand times.

You’ve worked there. Earned your living there. Made friends there.

And then one day London taps you on the shoulder.

And says, very quietly, “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

Dead Dog’s Hole.

Under my old office.

Who would have thought it?

And James Bond into the bargain.

And now, in other London news.

The Booker Prize.

And a rather wonderful result.

Yesterday evening, here in London, the Booker Prize was awarded to a novelist by the name of M. John Harrison.

For his book The End of Everything.

He’s 81 years old.

Eighty-one!

The oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize.

The prize has been going since 1969.

And never before has it gone to somebody of such advanced years.

The book, his thirteenth novel, is a dystopian satire.

A strange, unsettling world in which society has more or less fallen apart and people struggle to make sense of what’s happened to them.

It’s set on the Kent coast, in a future Britain.

And the chairman of the judges was none other than Mary Beard, the historian and classicist.

The winner gets £50,000.

Not bad for an 81-year-old.

Indeed, as an octogenarian myself, I find the whole business distinctly encouraging.

There’s hope for us old fellows yet.

But here’s something else.

Why is it called the Booker Prize?

Who or what is Booker?

Well, it’s not a person.

It’s a company.

Booker McConnell.

A British company whose commercial history goes back to the nineteenth century and the sugar plantations of British Guiana.

Guyana, as it’s now known.

And there’s a decidedly dark side to that history, because the company’s origins are bound up with the plantation economy of the British Empire, including slavery and, subsequently, exploitative labour.

Sugar. Rum. Plantations.

Not necessarily the first things that spring to mind when you think of one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

But in the 1960s, Booker began taking an interest in something rather different.

Books.

And at this point, today’s two stories suddenly come together.

Because guess who turns up again?

James Bond.

Yes, James Bond.

Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, was a friend and golfing companion of Jock Campbell, the chairman of Booker.

And Booker established an authors’ division.

It bought a 51 per cent share in the profits from the worldwide royalties on Ian Fleming’s books.

The price?

£100,000.

And if you were looking for a way of making money out of books, the worldwide royalties from James Bond weren’t a bad place to begin.

Booker subsequently acquired interests in the works of other famous authors.

Agatha Christie, for example.

And in 1969, the company became the original sponsor of a new literary award.

The Booker Prize.

The first winner was P. H. Newby, for Something to Answer For.

And here we are, 57 years later.

An 81-year-old novelist picks up the prize.

For The End of Everything.

And takes home £50,000.

And there’s a rather splendid coincidence in all of this.

We started in the Driftless Hills.

Made our way across the Atlantic to Dead Dog’s Hole.

Found James Bond lurking underneath my old office.

And then, completely unexpectedly, he pops up again in the story of the Booker Prize.

Two very different London stories.

One rather famous secret agent.

The name’s Bond.

James Bond.

This is London.

This is London Walks.

Streets ahead.

Story time. History time.

And yes, here it is, the first “Special” in the new era of London Calling. Done because I wanted to do it not because I was toeing the line of turn one out every day.

On that front, incidentally, things are off to a pretty good start. I’ve been out and about a lot more than was possible in Do A Podcast Every Single Day era. Have already bagged a couple of very interesting interviews. Watch this Space. See you Saturday for sure. And who knows, maybe before Saturday. Should another Special tap me on the shoulder and say, “hey what about it, can I have this dance?”